Abstract: The cultural, economic, political and social transformations experienced in the 20th century, coupled with episodes of authoritarianism and violence, changed the relationships established with the past and with time, requiring new approaches to the notions of memory, forgetting and temporality. On the one hand, we realise that memory has become a duty, giving rise to situations of abuse, tyranny and saturation; on the other, that the passage of time has seemed to be stopped by the experience of a present of successive instants. At this juncture, there is a discrepancy between discourses and memorial representations in terms of the ideological and political component: while memories and victims of communist experiences are named, there is a lack of recognition of memories and victims of capitalism, even when victims of fascism are mentioned. The problem of this research, therefore, concerns the study of the conditions of production of memories of capitalism and the naming of its victims, through an expanded understanding of capitalism as a reason whose normativity has been extended to all dimensions of life, affecting the relationship with the past and with time. The project is divided into four thematic axes: 1) Memories of modern and contemporary slavery; 2) Memories of colonialism and imperialism; 3) Neoliberalism and the capitalocene; and 4) Capitalism and its monumentalisation. The hypotheses that support the research consider that capitalism's tendencies towards abstraction, acceleration and naturalisation encourage its invisibilisation as a producer of inequalities, hierarchies and human rights violations. These tendencies also contribute to the de-temporalisation of the system, which in turn results in a memory of capitalism as absence. The research will combine analyses of specific cases in each of the thematic axes, reinterpreting certain events as expressions of memories of capitalism in relation to the history of the system itself.

Timetable: November 2023 - November 2026

Research team: Caroline Silveira Bauer (coord.); Caroline Pacievitch (UFRGS), Fernando Nicolazzi (UFRGS), Melina Perussatto (UFRGS), Odilon Caldeira Neto (UFJF), Pedro Caldas (UNIRIO), Rodrigo Turin (UNIRIO), and Silvia Correa (FLUP)